RUPERT BROOKE
I
The war has at last given birth to a good battle-song. It rings out from the next number of New Numbers—that grey quarterly which a quartet of young poets began to issue some twelve months ago, and which is still courageously not merely keeping alive in spite of the war, but actually growing more living by dint of it. One of the quartet (and the greatest, I still firmly believe) is our fellow-townsman, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. Another, the youngest, is Mr. Rupert Brooke—and it is from his lips that the new song has sprung. It is not a long song, so I can repeat it all. Its title is simply The Soldier. It accepts the traditional form.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed:
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less,
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day,
And laughter, learnt of friends, and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Poetry is always preciser than prose, more brief, more direct and exact; its exquisite curves as businesslike as the hardly less lovely lines whose lift and lapse make common shorthand so decorative. And those fourteen bars of beautiful melody somehow manage to cage, more completely than ever before, one of the dimmest and deepest, one of the most active but most elusive, of all the many mixed motives, beliefs, longings, ideals, which make those of us who have flung aside everything in order to fight still glad and gratified that we took the course we did. There do come moments, I must admit, when doubts descend on one dismally, when one's soldiering seems nothing but a contemptible vanity, indulged in largely to keep the respect of lookers-on. And, of course, cowardice of that sort, a small pinch of it anyway, did help to make most of us brave. There was the love of adventure, too, the longing to be in the great scrum—the romantic appeal of "the neighing steed and the shrill trump"—all the glamour and illusion of the violent thing that has figured for ever in books, paintings, and tales, as the supreme earthly adventure.... But beneath all these impulses, like a tide below waves, there lies also a world of much deeper emotion. It is a love of peace, really, a delight in fairness and faith—an inherited joy in all the traditional graces of life and in all the beauty that has been blessed by affection. It is an emotion, an impulse, for which the word "patriotism" is a term far too simple and trite. It is an impulse defined precisely, without suppression, blur, or excess, in the fourteen flowing lines I have quoted. One fights for the sake of happiness—for one's own happiness first of all, certain that did one not fight one would be miserable for ever—and then, in the second place, for the quiet solace and pride of those others, spiritual and mental sons of ours, if not actually physical—the men of our race who will depend for so much of their dignity upon the doings of the generation before. War is a boastful, beastly business; but if we don't plunge into it now we lower the whole pitch of posterity's life, leave them with only some dusty relics of racial honour. To enter into this material hell now is to win for our successors a kind of immaterial heaven. There will be an ease and a splendour in their attitude towards life which a peaceful hand now would destroy. It is for the sake of that spiritual ease and enrichment of life that we fling everything aside now to learn to deal death.
II
The Soldier is Mr. Rupert Brookes finest poem, I think; but he has others in this same number worth remembering. I like this:—
Now, God be thanked Who has watched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping;
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there
Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to share the laughing heart's long peace there,
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
Finally, there is this royal requiem:—
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene
That men call age; and those who would have been
Their sons, they gave their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again,
And we have come into our heritage.
That series of sonnets seems to me to sum up all that is best in our present persuasion. Those who have felt the impulses it expresses will find their convictions confirmed, their nerve strengthened, their pride and their courage redoubled. And those who have never yet felt them will be unable, I hope to God, to read without experiencing a sudden revelation, a revelation that will endow them with a manly mission at last and turn them into exultant Crusaders.